


R

by WaltzQueen



Category: BioShock
Genre: Be gentle, Gen, first fic here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-06-28
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:45:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1243321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaltzQueen/pseuds/WaltzQueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack accepts the key to the city and bears the sins of the father into its years of fruition. Rapture lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The world spun on its axis. The horrible pain brought no sound from Jack as he flew before the ground came up to meet him with a dull smack. The ADAM engorged monster that was Fontaine stumbled out of the clutches of the strange apparatus that had infused him with enough ADAM to destroy his wavering humanity. Fontaine clutched the small holes in his chest where the needle that had pierced his thick, dark hide for the fourth time jutted out from him. His voice boomed like three people at once were trying to be heard over the Adam in his blood stream. 

“I had you built. I sent you top side." The needle was given a powerful throw as it was yanked out of his already healing flesh. "I showed you what you was, what you was capable of!" The tip embedded itself into the ground near his neck. "Even that life you thought you had? That was something I dreamed up." Fontaine swayed with the loss of ADAM, dealing with his first low after the high. Jack concentrated on simply staying awake. He had used all of his First Aids earlier on in the fight. "And had tattooed inside your head."

As Fontaine's voice roared on Jack struggled not to close his eyes. He couldn't let them down. Tenenbaum, the girls, he had to help them. If he closed his eyes he would let them all die. He could almost here them now. They would cry and say- "Get Him!" No, they wouldn't say that, they, wait….

Jack's slow thoughts raced as he watched the girls crawl out of their holes in the wall, with their shiny, blood stained needles in tow. As Fontaine's meaty paw reached out to snuff him out one of them had jumped onto the abomination of a man and stabbed him in his ear. Fontaine bellowed in pain and twisted violently. His plasmids and gene tonics struggled to heal him but the needle steadily sucked them out. 

"Come on, Come on!" the girl cried. Fontaine groaned as he began to collapse. The little girl jumped off and instructed her gathering of called friends to suck the life and Adam from him. “Stab him!" Another jumped on his back, stabbing him with all her might. She was flung off as Fontaine fell onto his back. The girls surged like things possessed and began to drain all of his blood. The venous, over-sized form of Fontaine lay on the floor like a grotesque statue as his voice grew silent and the children kept stabbing. Jack heard the sounds of flesh ripping and children crying for blood as darkness stole his vision. It was a long time before the void lifted.  
The moment Jack was gifted once more with awareness he pushed himself off the ground. The air swam around his head as though he was standing outside in the seawater. He saw the little girls standing around Fontaine, one of the littler ones was still gently sucking Adam from him as she repeatedly stabbed his corpse. She noticed his movement and hurried over. Her tattered purple dress made soft noises as she moved towards him. Her large violet eyes were wary.

Her arm extended to hand him something barely brass under the grime. He recognized it quickly. It was Ryan's genetic key. It was the key to the city. They were giving him the city. He hesitantly reached for it. The young girl flinched away. Jack retracted his hand and kneeled. Seeing that all was well and that he hadn't been driven mad with Adam she smiled wanly and held the key aloft. Jack took it and set it down on the floor. His arms slid around her tiny, bird-like shoulders and he held her close.  
The tiny girl smiled and hugged him back. The others came over and held him as well. Suddenly there he was, a man awash in a sea of gratitude and tiny joyful bodies. He let his right hand reach down and grasp the key. It lay in his palm dull and bloody much like the city itself. His thumb rubbed small circles in it and with every revolution more and more grime fell away. Jack smiled at it. They had given him a city tired of pain and sick from bloody war. They had trusted him with everything they had. He rubbed it hard against his sleeve. He held it at eye level now. The girls looked on in wide eyed wonder as it lay sparkling in Jack's palm. They had given him their trust and their hope and their city. now he was going to bring their dreams to life. Rapture would live once more. Even if Jack had to rebuild with his own hands.


	2. Regius

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Regius- royal

The crisp sound of pressurized air escaping the bathysphere signaled the arrival of royalty. Jack's head poked out the slightest bit before the rest of him came into view. The sling full of weapons jostled against the beige sweater that still smelt of the sea. His boots made a clank that echoed off the walls. Jack crept along with his ears straining for every drop of water, every creak of metal and possible enemies' footfall. He had mostly cleaned out a sizable chunk of Arcadia, but there was really no telling who was and was not out there. 

Jack silently slid out of the bathysphere station. Considering the last ruler or Rapture would have demanded trumpets and praise for his arrival anywhere it was almost impressive how the current king of the bloody place was at being unheard and unseen. His swiveling eyes beheld a fairly vast expanse of green interspersed by bodies. Everything seemed to be in the clear. Still, Jack wouldn't be hanging around long enough to see that state of affairs change.

It was fairly silly, honestly. Tenenbaum already had a secure home for the girls away from the splicers. What had compelled him to come here? Maybe it was the lack of propaganda spilling over the airwaves. Perhaps it was the relative lack of destruction ,here where everything was organic and green. He set out in a steady jog for Julie Langford's place. Maybe he would find what was calling out for his attention.

The spongy earth gave way to the metal of the tunnel sooner than Jack would have liked but he was not thinking about that. The hole that splicers had cut in the doorway of Julie's Laboratory grew nearer as Jack kicked more corpses aside. Outside the doorway he hesitated. No sounds presented themselves. Nothing moved. The scent of sulfur hung heavily in the air. The shotgun barrel rasped against the grenade launcher. A low ringing grew louder in his ears.

"Mongrel!" Jack turned to see a frost covered splicer raising an attack. The sound of gunpowder like thunder reigned supreme and she was looted before being laid to the side of the tunnel. Rapture was rotting with enough bodies already, he didn't need anymore getting in his way. Jack tromped on inside. Ryan's offense on the labs lay on the ground smelling strongly of rot and chemicals. Jack groaned with his new Big Daddy voice like a mournful whale. Rapture was already a disaster, the places that were clean couldn't afford to start a downward spiral as well. Jack worked, taking corpses and dumping them outside the door. As he did so he saw more and more detail to the mutations of prolonged splicing. Womens' skin had grown through their pretty dresses. Mens' noses had receded into their faces. One man had what appeared to be three extra hands growing out of his lower leg. Hands covered in slimy blood trembled under the forces of nasuea before he ended his task and followed the tunnel up to Julie's chamber.

Julie Langford lay stiff on the floor. He hadn't had much time to pay her corpse any attention. There were no markings on her, no mutations, no scratches or pus bleeding wounds. She had died of poisoning, not splicing. She had died by the hands of a man, now dead himself. She died healthy. Her weight laying in his arms, told him so. Her golden brown curls bounced in his peripheral vision as he bounded down the steps and out into the rolling hills. Distantly an alarm rang coupled with screams before trailing off. Disregarding the noise he continued his one man funeral procession.

The small freshwater stream sat uninterrupted near the doors. Jack half wished he could peel off his clothes and take a dip in it . He knew enough to know that doing so would be asking to get caught unaware so he hurried on past Julie Langford in her new grave towards the bathysphere to Hephaestus Core. He had one more stop to make today. The last time Jack had been here he had to pry the doors open and had been greeted by shaking and rumbling in the darkness. Now the doors open before him and the halls light up where ever he walked. Nothing came near him, there was nothing here. Nothing at all but him and a man. Andrew Ryan had been, in turns, a visionary, a leader, a figurehead, a murderer and a madman. He had also been his genetic father in a world where genes meant so much. A distant part supposed he should have felt something towards this man, something besides the cold indifference he had. Jack reached down and yanked the twisted metal golf-club out of his head with a sickening squelch. It clanged on the floor as he reached out towards the shell of a man on the ground.

Andrew Ryan's hand rasped on the floor as Jack dragged him to the bed in the next room over. A trail of blood led from Andrew's head back to that damning golf club. The shiny brass buttons on his coat glinted as he was heaved onto the soft coverlet. Andrew's arms were crossed with an honor he may have deserved in some other time and place and the brown bedding was wrapped around his body. Jack sat on the edge of the bed. His head low, he felt the blood on his hands, on the backs and palms and between the fingers. Jack gently rose and left the room. He spared a glance back before the door closed. The dark leather boots clunked against the polished wood. He strode over to the golf club on the floor. It couldn't have been more than half a pound, a small scrap of metal. Yet it felt heavy in his hand. He set it in the sleeve of clubs and turned to leave. The air lock turned automatically as he came near. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. For one more night, Andrew Ryan would own the city. It was his pride and joy, let him have it one last day. Jack turned the heavy wheel on the other side until the door opened. He exited and headed for the nearest bathysphere to Olympus Heights. He would be safe with Tenenbaum for the time being. He would have a lot of work to do, but for now he needed rest.


	3. Relict

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Relict - left behind; surviving

The children welcomed him enthusiastically. The noise of small, quick footsteps made a sound like rain as they approached. They swarmed around his feet like splicers would around them. A small smile took root on Jack's face. The children all spoke in a flurry of questions, gestures and exclamations completely blocking out the warbling of the woman on the radio. One of them asked to be picked up. She giggled,when obliged, and waved down at her compatriots. They playfully waved back and asked, "What is weather like?" Her arms spun gently to and fro with each clunking step he took downwards. Jack hunched on his way down the stairs, before straightening up once he hit the bottom. His head came fairly close to the ceiling. Being spliced up from birth on will sure do things to you, he mused. His eyes dusted the ceiling. Especially with growth hormones. He vaguely recalled the stewardess from the the Plane. She had made a startled noise when she saw him get up to go the the bathroom. When questioned she explained that his height surprised her. He had not noticed anything odd about his height and told her so. She had smiled meekly and replied, "six and a half feet tall is no laughing matter." But that was neither here nor now and she had either drowned in the plane or died on impact.

More girls were now requesting the aerial treatment. He stooped down and grabbed three more around their petite stomachs and swayed the four of them back and forth. All of them giggled and 'weeee'd and generally enjoyed themselves as his bundles of weapons jangled merrily. He eventually set the girls down. Hopping around carefully made chalk drawings and over teddy bears in party hats, he approached the windowed section of the dank retreat. Most of the room was shadowed. The lights had made Tenenbaum little more than a smoking silhouette, the last time he had seen her. Now she was no where to be found. Jack looked around the voluminous area to find that the Little Sisters -he had trouble thinking of them as anything else after so long- had not approached the window with him. He gave them a questioning glance. Jack thought a moment and raised his hand towards the window and tilted his head in case the weren't quite nuanced in facial expressions but knew body language. Being chemically-and otherwise- put into a trance and made to spend lot of time with a voiceless person would make you adept in the art of body language he had imagined.

Luckily for him, Jack wasn't far off.

"Mama Tenenbaum said that she would be busy for a while," a tow headed Little Sister explained imperiously. She seemed to be slightly taller than the others and was probably the one to quiet any fights or still tears when Tenenbaum was away. She had a gentle voice with a vague European accent somewhere underneath that reliance on vowels that Jack had come to detect as being purely Rapturian. Jack took a moment to baulk at himself. Here was only three years old, with no personal knowledge of the world outside of Rapture and yet he could detect her heritage as being Swedish. The things the had seen fit to emblazon on his brain bewildered him. They also alarmed him. now that he had knowledge of his servitude, he also had the knowledge that every little mistake, every single judgment call and association were all someone else's. Jack had taken no breaks on the way to take down Fontaine once that cat was out of the bag - another phrase he had heard nowhere- and hadn't taken the time to dwell on his existence. He was now getting that time.

Jack had experienced more of the world then the small figures he was surrounded by, and yet he had seen less of the world than they had. One of the Audiodiaries had mentioned the ages in which a girl could become a Sister, five to nine, they had said. These girls were anywhere from two to seven years older than him and where he knew pain and Sweden and betrayal, they knew only Adam, trash lined halls, and Daddy. A few of them probably knew Sweden, or whatever country they had come from. In a few years it wouldn't matter, they'd have the same knowledge of the outside world as those born in Rapture.

In his travels Jack had not seen a school or anything related to children and growing. He did not consider the Little Sister's home related to children as much as it was related to splicing. He could probably remove the chemical instruments and turn the horror house into a school. It would take work but it was not unimaginable.

Out side the realm of building plans and restructuring, the mass of Little Sisters looked up at the frozen man expectantly. They were all well versed in staying quiet and patient. Loud, impatient little girls didn't live for long, here at the bottom of the sea.

Somewhere nearby some Nitro Splicer found himself in a foul mood and began throwing bombs for the hell of it. The tremors seemed to unfreeze Jack. He looked up warily for a moment. Jack was as swift a judge as ever and decided that this splicer was too close to the safe-house for comfort. Jack strode towards the stairs and the Sisters followed behind. One of them opened the door and he was no sooner out side than a series of explosions were heard. It took no more than two minutes total for Jack to electrocute the ill tempered madman and take a swinging leap at his skull with a frozen wrench before going back to the door. The wrench made a sheet of ice as he knocked for entrance. One of them -with purple eyes, who gave me the key- opened the door for him and led him back inside. The Sisters were nowhere to be seen when he came back in. He looked around, worried that something had gotten in and kidnapped them. The violet eyed girl strode into the center of the room and called out "Lilly-Poppy" in what must have amounted to her loudest voice. Suddenly the Little Sisters seemed to pour out of every crack and crevice in the room. At least four had come out of the flower shaped hole in the wall. Jack surmised that the strange word had meant something akin to "Coast's clear."

Jack sat on the bed he had awoken on, not too long ago and watched the girls. Now a happy murmur sounded as the girls began to play with their toys, sometimes coming up to show him their blocks and pulling him over to see their drawings. He greeted each one with a fond smile and a hint of his Big groan. They still seemed to respond well to the sound of a Big Daddy despite the removal of the Chemical conditioning, he noted absently. Health kits and canned meat were not substitutes for real sleep. His eyes started to slowly grow heavy, heavier than the burden of Atlas with the world on his shoulders, Jack imagined. And soon enough, he was asleep.


	4. Renovation

It starts with trash cans.

Jack’s heavy boots clank on the metal floors as he tromps down endless corridors. His fingers glance the wall as he passes, right arm extended and never making real contact yet never not touching the glass and metal separating them from the water. He starts in Hephaestus because he plans to work his way up. He moves from Hephaestus to Neptune’s Bounty and on to the residential Areas. Some trashcans are sitting up perfectly untouched, as though the decay around them is an illusion they alone know the secrets to; many trash cans are not.

The first run through he makes is for trash cans. He sets them upright and trudges after those that roll away like rabbits on the lamb. He is a strong young man and the cans are aluminum and light. The almost don’t feel like they weigh anything at all as he grabs them and tips them upright. Some of the trash cans have useful items; money discarded by those sure that it had no place in their new lives, uneaten candy bars hidden in pockets of paper, fruit from Arcadia on the verge of turning itself into a vintage wine. Most of the trash cans only contain remnants of the lives that must have passed by.

His second run is also for trash cans. Jack dumps each trash can out on the floor without a hint of remorse. The place is already filthy and he plans to clean it up eventually. He rummages through the garbage in search of anything spoiled and anything rotting. Arcadia is doing well all by itself, but compost would surely help. He runs, like a yo-yo, back and forth to Arcadia and the rest of the city. He encounters splicers as he goes and takes them with him. Jack is good at digging graves and the fruit trees need all the fertilizer they can get, really.

The splicers seem endless sometimes. They fall off of the ceiling. They pop out of the water. They come swinging through a doorway Jack only just notices now. They feel like cockroaches that skitter everywhich way as soon as he comes in the room. But for all that their numbers are like roaches, they fall like threshed wheat underneath his feet. Eventually their numbers seem to stop increasing, which is a blessing, but they do not seem to ever decrease, which is not. He digs larger and larger graves. The splicers are packed like Sardines into their graves.   
He expected the bodies to help the trees but the ones nearest the graves seem to be growing weaker. He starts taking the splicers to the Medical Pavilion first. Their ashes work much better for the plants.

On his third run he goes out to Apollo Square and cleans an apartment complex. Waterlogged couches and scorched televisions pile up on top of the gallows in the middle of Apollo Square in place of the bodies that once swung there. Jack finds bodies of splicers and bodies of people. There are endless trunks of clothing and mementos. Safes stack up in an apartment on the ground floor. Some things are worth saving. Jack sets those aside to drag back to the Little Sisters and Tenenbaum. There is not enough space for everything, so he sets it aside for now. He vaguely hopes to make the apartments safe so the girls can play there. Maybe they can sleep there? Jack shakes his head and moves on.


End file.
